Coming into this season of my life I thought it would all be just go with the flow. I thought it would be a season in which I just sit back and follow a leader. I knew it would be a season of deep growth, but what has happened so far is mind boggling to me. After month 3 God decided to throw me on a wild roller coaster called being a team leader. God had completely changed my life in 3 months and he had way bigger plans than I ever thought of having. I accepted this position knowing God was going to move in big ways and teach me infinitely more than he did in the first 3 months of my race.
Since being a leader I have been broken in so many ways. I have been trying to figure out ways to foster growth, unity, love, honor, etc in my team. I have been just trying to find my path or my way of leadership that God has for me. I was doing an okay job at all this, but I wasn’t really satisfied in what I was doing. So I prayed and when you pray you get results. What came to me as a result of this prayer were an argument and a breakdown!
One great thing about being on the World Race is that we live in a culture of honor. It’s a culture that puts everyone else above us. It’s a culture of high grace and of much love. Sure I have been surrounded with great people before the race, but never with 40 some odd people who truly love me no matter what I do. These are people who will never leave me where I am at by myself and people who love me unconditionally. We also have something called feedback. Everyday we get the opportunity to speak life into one another. Feedback is all about perception and it is used to help us grow as Christians. We get to build people up with positive things, but we also get to call one another up into things we could do better.
So with this being said you understand just a little of how we live our lives. We can’t escape one another. We live together 24/7 for 11 months. Last week I got feedback on how I woke one member of my team up. You heard me right. To me this feedback sent me over the edge. Since becoming a team leader I knew I would be watched harder than anyone else and I new I would receive more feedback than anyone else. Over the past month I have received lots of little feedback like this and I didn’t know what to do with it. The enemy used it against me to tell me I was just a big target and people wanted something to complain. Satan told me all they wanted to do was moan and groan because they didn’t like me. He also told me that if I couldn’t do something as small as waking someone up right how could I ever do anything else right. He basically conned me into thinking that I would never be good and that I wasn’t made to be a leader. So with this feedback I got offended and we all had a little argument. It wasn’t the prettiest thing you have ever seen. Midway the feedback one of the people on my team asked me why I was offended and why didn’t I just accept it. After all feedback is about perception and we can let it roll off if it doesn’t fit. Even though the person who gave me the feedback explained why the reason I woke her up wrong was because it startled her and in her past she had a bad time with things like that I didn’t want to hear it. So I walked off to cool down.
I went to the church to get alone and I started to pray. As I said earlier when we pray we get results and boy did God give me a handful. The words they spoke to me started to play in my mind. Why was I offended? Why didn’t I just take the feedback? Why couldn’t I just honor this person in calling me up to better things? Then God gave me a revelation! It was a revelation that is related to my whole life before the race. I have been pretty good at serving and loving others all my life, but never before have I experienced the love and grace of humans like this before. In my life before this trip when I served and loved I felt like a lot of it was always thrown back in my face. I thought that people didn’t want my love and it made me believe that it was all due to me. I believed that everything I did had to be perfect or it wasn’t good enough. Even when I did things darn near perfect people still rejected it and it caused me to withdraw. I was serving and loving from a place of having to prove myself. I was doing all of this out of fear of failure. I thought that if I ever failed people would immediately reject me and not love me. I guess I had never really grasped the concept of unconditional love. I also had always let small things roll off my shoulders. I would rather you bring me something big to deal with than something little. In fact it would be easier for me to deal with something big than something this small.
I knew that God had unconditional love for me, but was it really possible for people to have that same love? So I came to the realization that despite how people receive my love and service I have to do it anyways. Jesus loved and served better than anyone else in history and people still hated and rejected him. My circumstances cannot determine how I love or serve. No matter how many people curse, reject, or persecute me I am loved unconditionally. No matter how many times or how bad I fail God still believes in me because he made me. He put me in this position and he will be faithful in doing what he wants. No matter how many lies the enemy throws at me I have to realize I am serving for an eternal purpose. I am not serving for me, but for Christ! Galatians 1:10 says, “Obviously, I’m not trying to win the approval of people, but of God. If pleasing people were my goal, I would not be Christ’s servant.”
So I am in a new season. I have found more of my identity in Christ. I know that I am going to fail, but I also know that failure does not make God love me less. I know that he is right there to pick me up, brush my shoulders off, and tell me to get back in there because HE believes in me. It is amazing to know that he loves me more than I could ever imagine and that he is pleased with me. All he asks me to do is seek him, serve him, love him, and love others with my WHOLE heart.
Also my team spoke sweet life into me after we met for the second time. They let me know that they were there no matter what. They let me know that they loved me unconditionally. They wanted me to be the best version of myself that I could be and they were just calling me up into that. That was something I had lacked before.
